Arash Azizi had been a member the International Marxist Tendency (IMT) for more than seven years. Recently Azizi left the organization. He outlines his decision to leave in this esssay at the request of many friends and comrades.

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When I joined the IMT in late 2008, few months after I had left my native Iran for Canada, this wasnt out of a whim. For about five years I had been a member of Worker-Communist Party of Iran (WPI), an Iranian organization that could be described as belonging to the Left Communist and Council Communist tradition. I had joined it at the age of 15 for the simple reason that it was the only Marxist organization I knew that dared to organize under the authoritarian Islamist regime that reigns in Iran. As I had started a process of questioning the WPI, and as I needed a political home in Canada, I embarked on a study of the international left from the times of Marx and Engels down to the currently existing international organizations and their branches in Canada. I chose IMT because it stood on unapologetic socialist politics (of much importance to me, it didn't follow much of the international left by supporting the Tehran regime); because the Trotskyist Anti-Stalinism appealed to me; because its political strategy of working inside the New Democratic Party (NDP) to win a majority for Marxist ideas in the countrys main working-class party seemed plausible; and because it boasted many hard-working people who took their politics seriously.